The CIA’s War on Trump, Continued

Echoing New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s warning that the
intelligence community is out to “get” President-elect Trump, a
Brookings Institution expert who served in the Clinton administration
says that Trump’s treatment of his spies will “come back to bite him” in
the form of “devastating” leaks to the media that will make him look
foolish or incompetent.Leaking by intelligence officials and analysts is, of course, illegal.

“The intelligence community doesn’t leak as much as the Pentagon or
Congress, but when its reputation is at stake, it can do so to
devastating effect,” says
Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Center for 21st Century Security and
Intelligence. Benjamin previously served as the principal advisor to
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on counterterrorism and was embroiled
in the controversy over Mrs. Clinton’s failure to stop the massacre of
four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.Benjamin’s article, “How Trump’s attacks on the intelligence
community will come back to haunt him,” did not refute the widely held
belief that President Obama’s CIA and its director John Brennan were
behind the recent leaks to The Washington Post and New York Times
depicting Trump as a Russian puppet. In fact, the implication is that
the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community will seek further
revenge on Trump if he continues to criticize them.

At his recent news conference, in regard to the leaks about his
meetings with intelligence officials, Trump noted that “I think it’s
pretty sad when intelligence reports get leaked out to the press. I
think it’s pretty sad. First of all, it’s illegal. You know, these are
classified and certified meetings and reports.”

But it appears that some intelligence officials believe they are
above the law and can use illegal leaks to damage an elected President
who has been critical of their work product.

In the most recent case, CNN and BuzzFeed were leaked a document
offering unsubstantiated claims of Trump being sexually compromised by
Russian officials. CNN summarized the document; BuzzFeed published the
whole thing.

Trump denounced these leaks, with Director of the Office of National
Intelligence James Clapper disclosing that he had called Trump about
them and had declared
his “profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the
press…” He said that he and Trump “both agreed that they are extremely
corrosive and damaging to our national security.”

Trump said Clapper “called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated.”

“I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC [Intelligence
Community],” Clapper said.

However, he did not indicate what
investigation, if any, he had conducted to make this determination.

“When something goes wrong—say a military deployment to combat jihadi
insurgents in the Middle East blows up in the Trump administration’s
face—the press will overflow with stories telling of intelligence
reports that were ignored by the White House and briefings the president
missed,” Benjamin wrote. Such stories, of course, would be based on
illegal leaks.

“Imagine what an aggrieved intel community might do to a genuinely
hostile president,” he said. Benjamin’s comments suggest that the
intelligence community will use the media to blame Trump for things that
go wrong in foreign affairs, in order to protect its own reputation.

Benjamin should know something about the relationship of the Intelligence Community to the news media. His bio
says that he began his career as a journalist and held positions as the
Germany bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and Germany
correspondent for Time magazine.

The Brookings expert said, “the CIA is usually one of the very first
agencies to establish a relationship with new chief executives, because
of the briefings it delivers before elections have even occurred and the
beguiling prospect it offers of handling missions quietly and
efficiently.”

It’s not clear what he means by this. The Obama CIA’s “covert”
arms-running program in Syria has backfired in a big way, provoking a
Russian military intervention, the loss of up to 500,000 lives, and a
refugee crisis which threatens the future of Europe.

Benjamin speculated that Trump will ask the CIA to organize a covert
operation to undermine the regime in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism,
and that the agency will offer him options that don’t guarantee success
and which he may have to reject. He wrote that “…it is an iron law of
bureaucracy that no agency will knock itself out for a leader it deems
capricious, especially one who cannot be relied on to defend his own if
something goes wrong.”

“The answer from the intel community will never be no,” he said.
“Instead, the planners will brief the president on three different
approaches. Then they will assess the risk of failure for each at 60-80
percent, providing the Oval Office with a dare it cannot possibly
accept. For some, of course, this could turn out to be a silver lining
in otherwise dismal story.”

In short, the CIA will look for excuses not to proceed, and then get
back to the business of leaking damaging stories to the press when
terrorist incidents and other problems occur.

Is the CIA really the “invisible government” that the so-called
“conspiracy theorists” have warned about? Is there a “deep state” that
tries to run the government behind-the-scenes?

Articles like those of Daniel Benjamin, a journalist who became a
Hillary Clinton operative in the counter-terrorism field, seem to be
more damaging to the idea of American self-government than anything the
Russians have been accused of doing.